Do we need public transport?

Australia's biggest cities are being changed by the policy known as smart growth or urban consolidation, and public transport plays an important part in these plans. But is it really desirable, or indeed in a democracy possible, to move significant numbers of people from cars to public transport? Our first guest is Randal O'Toole, an economist who works for the Thoreau Institute, a pro-free market think tank in the US. We're also joined by Alan Moran who's with a similarly inclined Australian think tank, the IPA (Institute of Public Affairs), and has just published an article called 'The Public Transport Myth' in the latest issue of its magazine.

Transcript

Michael Duffy: Australia's biggest cities are being changed by the policy known as smart growth or urban consolidation. This involves two main ideals; first, outward housing growth is restricted and replaced by upwards growth. For example, people are encouraged to live in flats rather than houses. And second, a lot of car travel is to be replaced by public transport. The two ideals are intimately connected. You need the high population density to support public transport, especially trains and light rail. Today we're going to discuss one aspect of this in particular which is whether it's really desirable, and indeed in a democracy possible to move significant numbers of people out of their cars to public transport.

Our first guest is Randal O'Toole. He's an economist who lived for many years in Portland Oregon, and that was one of the first cities, certainly the most famous, to adopt the policy of urban consolidation, and Randal has written about that experience in his book The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths. I've been keen to get him on the program for a long time because Portland is often pointed to by Australian planners as some sort of an ideal. Randal works for the Thoreau Institute, they're a pro free market think-tank in the US. And our other guest is Alan Moran who is with a similarly inclined Australian think-tank, the IPA, the Institute of Public Affairs, and he has just published an article called 'The Public Transport Myth'. That's in the latest issue of its magazine.

Welcome both of you to the program. Alan, as a quick instance of how this subject is important, what are the government's transport spending priorities for Melbourne over the next decade?

Alan Moran: Well, according to the government's own plan it's about 6.something billion for urban public transport and about 2 billion for roads. Of course a lot of the urban transport does travel on roads. And that contrasts with the existing modal split between cars and public transport of 92 to 8. In other words, 92% of trips are by cars, and 8% are by public transport. So we've got a three to one spending, public transport to roads, in spite of public transport being only 8%.

Michael Duffy: And this is part of the urban consolidation plan called Melbourne 2030, isn't it?

Alan Moran: Yes, it is. It hangs off Melbourne 2030 and, as you said in your intro, a lot of it is to do with preventing outward growth of the city and trying to force growth upwards.

Michael Duffy: Sydney has got a similar plan, it's called the Metropolitan Strategy. Randal, is this sort of thing that's happening in Melbourne and Sydney typical of what's occurring in many cities around the first world?

Randal O'Toole: Yes, in the United States, cities like San Jose and San Francisco and Portland and Denver, and in Canada, Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver are all trying these policies. And of course in Europe these policies have been in effect really since WWII, and so we have a long time trend to look at and see how well they've worked in Europe, and in some US cities they've been in effect for 30 years and so we can see how well they've worked there and make a projection of how well they're going to work in Australia.

Michael Duffy: And is Portland the first or one of the first more recent cities to adopt this?

Randal O'Toole: Yes, I would say Portland actually isn't the first. I'd say San Jose and San Francisco are the first. If you look at San Jose, they began adopting policies like this in 1974 and ever since then they have dramatically increased their population density which is something that urban consolidation calls for, and they have built lots and lots of rail transit, and they've managed to increase transit share of travel from 1.5% to 2%.

Michael Duffy: I'd like to go through the experience with you, maybe focusing on Portland. Obviously there must have been a reason to do these things, because they were very unusual. What was the hope, what was the intention of these plans?

Randal O'Toole: Originally the intention was to preserve farm lands. The idea was that urban growth was developing farm lands and converting them into housing developments and that this was somehow a bad thing, and it is peculiar because in most western states in the United States, the vast majority of land...in fact in every state in the United States the vast majority of land is rural open space. In Oregon, 98% of the state is rural open space, much of that being farm or forest land. Even in California, the most populated state in the United States, 95% of the people live on just 5% of the land area, with 95% being rural open space.

Michael Duffy: That being the case, it sounds peculiar that their motivation would have been to save farm land. Was that really the reason?

Randal O'Toole: That's what they said the reason was, and then later they started saying we have to reduce driving because that causes pollution and global warming and all of that, but what we find out is we spend billions of dollars on rail transit, we pack people in into uncomfortably small living quarters, we drive up the price of housing, and guess what? Most travel by far is still by automobile.

Michael Duffy: Let's talk about public transport for a moment. What did Portland build in the way of new public transport?

Randal O'Toole: We built light rail lines which were fancy street cars, and then we built what we called street car lines which were not quite so fancy street cars in the downtown area. They're now building an aerial tramway, as if that's going to get a lot of cars off the road, between a major hospital and a downtown housing development.

Michael Duffy: You talked earlier about a slight percentage shift in the number of people using transit. Are you just talking about light rail there or does that include buses? In other words, are these new people coming from cars or maybe they're coming from buses?

Randal O'Toole: It turns out, if you look at all transit in the Portland area, about 2.5% of all travel is by mass transit with 1% of that being by light rail and the rest of it by buses. The interesting thing is that in 1980 before they started building light rail, transit actually carried a larger percentage of people, so building light rail has forced them to cannibalise their bus system because light rail is so expensive. We've reduced bus service, we've increased bus fares and so we actually carry fewer people as a proportion of total travel.

Michael Duffy: Alan, can you just give us a picture over the past 50 years in Melbourne, what have been the shifting fortunes of the popularity of the car versus public transport?

Alan Moran: Public transport 50 years ago was about 57% of total trips, it's now about 8%, and this is really as a result of the general geographic spread of cities, that cities are no longer what they used to be. There is no longer really a core to which everyone goes to. If there's a downtown core then you can actually relatively efficiently accommodate that with mass transit. In fact, sometimes you have to do it that way.

Michael Duffy: Unlike other parts of Australia such as Sydney, Melbourne kept its trams. Does that mean that trams are a good idea there?

Alan Moran: Trams work after a fashion in Melbourne because there are very wide streets...at least some of the streets are very wide and they work reasonably well. That said, the trams hopelessly don't pay for themselves. They probably pay about 20% of their costs. In other words, those people who use trams, which basically radiate from the city centre, are subsidised quite considerably by the rest of the population, and indeed those using the trams tend to be the most affluent people who live closer in, so there's a sort of equity issue in that. But the trams do carry a reasonable amount of people and they're no less efficient than some of those systems that Randal was talking about in Portland.

Michael Duffy: And as you've said before, the government hopes to greatly increase the number of people using public transport. What sort of increase is it looking for?

Alan Moran: It's looking to go from 8% to 15% which is of course a joke. That would be totally unprecedented worldwide. I think you mentioned earlier on, you have to have pretty high densities to be able to attract people to public transport. The densities of Melbourne and Sydney is about 1,700 people per square kilometre, and really, mass transit in the terms of rail to make any sense has got to be some 40,000, a massive amount more than is conceivable would ever occur in Australia, would ever be tolerated by Australians. So it is a joke, it's almost a piece of whimsy, that they are doing things to pull the wool over people's eyes without any intent to carry it through because it would be impossible.

Michael Duffy: Randal, what would you say about the hope of a city like Melbourne to increase transit usage from 8% to 15%? What chance do they have?

Randal O'Toole: There's really two ways you can increase transit usage that much. One is to order all the employers to move all the jobs downtown because really it's not population density, it's the job density at the urban core. So, if Melbourne could somehow force at least 25% to 50% of the employers in the region to move their jobs downtown, that could increase transit ridership. The other way is to make people poor. If people are poor enough they won't be able to afford to drive. You can make people poor by driving up housing costs so that they can't afford transportation and living in homes. You can make people poor by driving up driving costs, by taxing cars far more than they're taxed today, and I'm talking about really, really high taxes, like $10 or $20 a gallon of petrol rather than the $2 or $3 or whatever is paid in Australia today. We look at Europe where taxes are $4 and $5 a gallon of petrol and that isn't enough to really drive down driving. People there are driving more and more and they're using transit less and less just like everywhere else.

Michael Duffy: Why is that? Why are cars so...is public transport so unpopular?

Randal O'Toole: I think the first question really is a pertinent one. Why are cars so popular? And the answer is simple; they are the most convenient, most inexpensive form of transportation for any trips up to several hundred miles that you can take. Really short trips you would walk or bicycle, but anything from a mile to several hundred miles, cars can't be beat. They go door to door, they go when you want to go, you can eat in your car, you don't have to follow all kinds of rules, you can take your children, you can take your pets, you can stop and go at various places...that's called 'trip chaining' where you drop laundry off at the laundromat and then you pick up your kids at school and then you go to the grocery store. All of those things can be done by car, they're very hard to do by mass transit, and so cars have just won out because of their convenience and their economy.

Michael Duffy: I'd like to ask both of you the same question now, starting with Alan. Let's put aside the likelihood of success and just look at the desirability of such a change. If you could wave a magic wand and get people out of cars and onto trains, would the world be a better place in terms of the environment or social equity? Alan?

Alan Moran: People are bedazzled by Paris and Rome and they think, okay, if we manage to get these very densely packed cities we'd have the café latte, the theatre society which they perceive to be in operation there, but of course those cities are pretty much like our cities as well. They do have a dense core but the rest of the cities are sprawled, and that's the way people want to live. If in fact we were to force that concentration, then it would be not the way people want. Indeed, the only city that I've seen which has achieved those very degrees of concentration was Moscow under the Soviet period where of course it was totally forbidden to build anywhere outside where the authorities said, and that was not a recipe for a successful city or a happy city.

Michael Duffy: But what about the environment? Is public transport more beneficial?

Alan Moran: There is a study done actually for Sydney by the CIE (Centre for International Economics) which has said, oh well, public transport, we should have more of that because various aspects...they do look at congestion, they look at pollution. But pollution in cities is actually coming down quite a lot in almost every city in the developed world. Congestion is another matter, and certainly congestion is important and there are costs from congestion but those costs are created by the government authorities themselves not building enough roads. Sydney is of course a disgrace in terms of its road building and there are congestion costs as a result. The bottom line is that the motorist pays more than twice as much as is spent on roads in Australia and therefore it's the duty of the governments really to actually give the motorists, give the people who are spending those taxes the services which they warrant.

Michael Duffy: How do you mean they spend twice as much?

Alan Moran: Well, in terms of the fuel tax and various motor taxes et cetera, vehicle taxes, the collection in Australia as a whole is twice as much as is spent on roads.

Michael Duffy: What about the argument that one hears from supporters of public transport that the more roads you build the more car trips people will take and it's a sort of endless thing, you can never actually build enough roads to cure congestion. Is that an accurate argument?

Alan Moran: I don't see how it can be. People actually take trips really because they want to go from A to B, rather than just joy riding. That does indicate that if you build roads people will take more joy rides. There may be some of that but essentially people travel by road or by transit or by any other means to go from A to B rather than simply to scenically drive through the cities, so I can't see how there's any possibility of more roads creating more trips except in a trivial sense.

Michael Duffy: Randal, can I ask you about some of those same issues? For example, would it be better for the environment if more people used public transport?

Randal O'Toole: No, I don't think it would be better for the environment. Public transport does not use noticeably less energy per passenger mile than automobiles. Public transport produces more of certain kinds of pollution, such as nitrogen oxides which are a component of smog, than automobiles. And public transport consumes more land. You sometimes hear people say if you had a rail line you can carry as many people as a ten-lane freeway, but the reality is almost no rail lines in the world outside of really dense places like Manhattan carry as many people as even one lane of a freeway. So you end up having to devote more land to transport if you use rail systems than if you use highways and roads. With highways and roads you can put buses on them, you can put cars on them, you can put trucks on them, so everybody shares the right of way, everybody shares the cost, and it's very effective and very efficient.

Michael Duffy: What about the issue of cost? I mean, is it possible to say anything about the comparative costs of moving people in big cities by transit compared with road?

Randal O'Toole: I can only speak to the United States where the total cost of driving including subsidies to highways, including the costs paid by the user, including social costs like pollution, the total costs are about 20 cents per passenger mile. The total cost of riding public transport in the United States is about 75 cents a passenger mile, of which the user only pays about 25 cents and the rest is subsidised by tax payers. So public transport is far more expensive than driving, which is one reason why, in 1920, when the United States had the world's most extensive public transport system, the average American only used public transport about 450 miles a year, whereas today we're driving in cities 12,000 miles per person per year. So you can see we've had a huge increase in mobility because of the automobile and because of the economy.

Michael Duffy: Alan, what about the poor? Isn't it the case that improved public transport would benefit people who don't have cars, who can't afford them?

Alan Moran: There's a fall back necessary for some people to travel, but I think if you look in terms of the profile of the public transport user as a whole, it isn't necessarily poor. There are certain areas of course, there are children and people who are not able to use cars for whatever reason, and I guess you need a fall back for them, but I think if you did the sums on that you'd probably find it's actually cheaper to transport them by taxi to the routes that they wanted to go. So basically everybody virtually has a car or access to a car, every adult in Australia, and everybody would prefer to use that rather than public transport, and the only times that they use public transport is where it's almost impossible not to do so (that is, journeys to the CBD where you can't park or whatever) or where for some reason they're not able to use their cars because of infirmity.

Michael Duffy: Randal, given everything that we've just heard, why is it...and this is a big question, why is it that public transport is still so popular with governments?

Randal O'Toole: I think one reason is that there's feeling that automobiles have encouraged people to be more isolated and lose their sense of community. I don't think that's true but I think people feel that way and so there's a communitarian movement that if people would just ride public transport we'll all love each other and we won't have so much hostility. There are other people who just make money from public transport, there are other people who want to promote downtown property values, et cetera, but I think all of these individual groups have different motivations and they're really against the overall public interest.

Michael Duffy: Thanks to both of you for joining us today. Randal O'Toole is an economist and author of The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths and he works for the pro free market Thoreau Institute. Alan Moran is with the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne.